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Severe Weather

Residents, businesses cope with power outage

OMAHA, Neb. -

Hundreds in downtown Omaha were fighting off the darkness and cold as Omaha Public Power District crews continued to restore power Monday after an outage Sunday night.

Officials said a cable failure in a network vault at 17th Street & St. Mary's Avenue caused a fire and subsequent explosion in the manhole and another manhole a block east around 5:45 p.m. Sunday. The outage, which affected about 2,000 customers at its peak, is now isolated to mainly businesses in the area of 11th to 20th streets between Leavenworth and Farnam streets.

The outage caused elevators to shut down, forcing Central Park Tower Apartment residents, like Ken Williams, to use the stairwell.

“They have to walk all the way down, most of them are disabled and can't come down,” Williams said.

Williams said with the power out and the heat not working, he checked on his neighbors, one of whom relies on power for her health.

“I take a nebulizer treatment every four hours, and I had to call an ambulance squad to come and give me a treatment,” Debbie Ross said.

Businesses, like Ted and Wally's Ice Cream, turned to generators to keep business afloat on Monday.

"The nice thing about the heat not working is it's a little chilly in here," said owner Joe Pittack.

"Key thing is we got to get our faxes going and our phones going because we do business nationwide,” said John Cooke with JP Cooke Company.

The United Way of the Midlands set up a system to keep its 211 program, which helps hundreds of needy families, somewhat operational.

“We do have the capability of transferring calls out to the call center specialists at homes, but we need electricity to do that switch as well,” said Kathy O’Hara with United Way of the Midlands.

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